


Rightside Up

by apollos



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, One Shot Collection, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-08 02:34:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13448700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: Stranger Things one-shot/abandoned fic idea collection. Tags/pairings to be added as I go.





	Rightside Up

**Author's Note:**

> since i can't add a summary for the first chapter, here's first chapter info:
> 
> Title: All We Do (Is Play It Safe)  
> Pairing: Jonathan/Nancy  
> Summary: this was going to be a longish fic where they play all of 20 questions between s1 and s2 and it's filled with unresolved sexual tension, and i'd written like another thousand words of it, but i somehow lost all that. i was struggling to write it in the first place and that loss pretty much killed my motivation, but i like to do one shot collections and i figured this'd be a good place to start. the title's from "all we do" by oh wonder, which is an EXCELLENT jancy song. it talks about the upside down!

"We should play twenty questions," she says.

"What's that?"

"It's a game where you ask each other twenty questions." She looks at him like that was the stupidest question ever, which to be fair, it probably was.

"How do you win?"

"That's not really the point." She's still looking at him, so skeptical. "It's just…a way to talk to each other."

 _Oh_ , he thinks. Okay. She wants to talk. They've talked, but never seriously, and she wants to do this through some silly game, something that sounds like middle schoolers do at parties and giggle about, like Truth or Dare or Spin the Bottle. He, of course, never played those games. Maybe it would be nice to play Truth or Dare with Nancy; maybe he should suggest that. Instead, he thinks, it's wise to let Nancy take control of this conversation. She'll probably grow bored with his answers, she'll probably pass out, or something.

So he says, "Okay, then. What's your favorite color?"

Nancy looks down at the bottle she's holding. "Pink," she says. "Isn't that terrible?"

"It's not terrible." Jonathan bites his lip, trying to keep himself from saying  _it's actually super cute_. "Your turn."

"Alright. What's  _your_ favorite color?"

"Red. It's calming. Because of the darkroom." He smiles at her, then looks down at his own bottle.

"That's cool," she says.

It is quiet as he thinks about what to say next. There are millions of things he wants to ask her, but he can't just go from  _what's your favorite color?_ to  _why don't you love me?_ and everything is getting all muddled up in his mind, possibly from the alcohol, more likely from the unexpected gravity of the situation. As usual, he feels the tension he feels whenever they're alone together, as if they are tied by a string and in the middle of the string hangs a weight. "What college do you want to go to?"

"I don't know. Maybe something on the East Coast."

His heart picks up. NYU's on the East Coast. But that's ridiculous. "Cool," he says, cringing.

"I know you want to go to NYU," she says, smiling. "So my question for you is—if you got accepted, would you really go?"

Jonathan leans back, putting his bottle beside him and planting the heels of his hand on the floor. It should be a simple answer, and he knows this—of  _course_ he would go to NYU, right? But his mother, and Will. The money. The distance. "I think so," he settles on.

"It's because of Will, isn't it?" she asks.

He nods. "That's another question," he says, trying to steer the conversation towards something lighter.

"Okay, you get to ask me two, and we skip me." She screws her face up, trying to figure out if this is really how it works. "I need to—I need to keep tally."

She gets up off the floor and goes to her nightstand, pulling out a girly-looking notebook and a pen with a feather on top. She comes back and opens the notebook up, writing their names at the top. Her handwriting is neat, pretty, and he loves the way  _JONATHAN_  looks in it, thinks about how girls will write their crush's last name attached to theirs in the corner of their notes. He knows that if she had ever done that, the name wouldn't have been Byers, it would have been Harrington. He also knows that she's not really the type of girl to do that anyway, not without then scribbling it out and feeling stupid.

"Okay, so. Favorite color, both of us, that's one. School, from you, and going, from me, and then another one from me…you're at two, and I'm at three." She writes these as tally marks, neat, straight lines.

He's impressed, and he doesn't try to hide it. "What did you dream about last night?" he asks. He knows it couldn't have been a nightmare, because she would have told him.

Curiously, her face goes a little red, but it might be a flush from the liquor. "That's private," she says.

"That's against the rules of the game." Now he wants to know.

"I had…a....weird...dream," she mumbles, looking down.

"Oh." He feels the weight on the invisible string dip, tugging him. He can recover this, he thinks. "Okay, next question. If you had to dye your hair, what color would it be?"

She bursts out laughing as she writes the tally: Jonathan 4, Nancy 3. "I wouldn't," she says. "I like my hair the way it is. Except I want to cut it."

"Cut it?" he asks.

"Yeah. I don't know. It's time for a change."

He nods. He understands that. "You'd look good with short hair," he says, because what he means is that she'd look good anyway, always.

"You should get a haircut, too," she says. "I can take you to my salon."

They laugh in that way you only laugh when you're drunk, then, at something that's not really funny but feels like the biggest joke in the universe. She puts her pen down and brings her hands to her face, tears collecting in the corner of her eyes, and his stomach clenches with the effort. This was a good idea, he thinks. This is good.

"Okay, my turn." She marks another tally. "Who was your first crush?"

"My first crush?"

"Yeah, you know. The first girl you were really into."

Jonathan really has to think about that, mostly because his brain is foggy and the only girl that's been in his mind for months is Nancy, he's kind of forgotten that other girls exist. Besides his mother, of course. "Hannah McIntyre, in middle school. She sat next to me in math class. She was always drawing, and she was really good. So one day, I asked her to show me her drawings, and it didn't go well." She'd seemed repulsed; he'd been so disappointed.

"Wow," Nancy says. She circles the tally marks in the notebook with a finger for a few seconds. "That's okay," she says, perking up. "Hannah's so weird now."

"Yeah, she is. Weirder than me."

"Oh, no you're not, Jonathan." She leans across the notebook—he realizes how close they've been sitting—and puts a hand on his shoulder. She looks in his eyes so intensely he thinks that she's going to kiss him. And then she takes her hand off his shoulder, moves to sit back down, the redness still high on her cheeks. "It's your turn," she says.

"Who was your first kiss?"

"Danny West. Eighth grade. Mary Jean's birthday party." She smiles. "He was terrible, and he got saliva all over my face. I was worried, after, that I didn't like boys all that much after all, because it was so bad."

Jonathan laughs. He can't imagine being able to kiss any better than a fourteen-year-old Danny West himself. He reaches for his bottle and takes another drink, trying to stop himself from feeling so goddamn  _morose_. Nancy, seeing him doing this, reaches for her own bottle.

"My turn again," she says. She writes another tally. "This will be five. A fourth of the way through." She's starting to ramble; he's starting to feel as if somebody's drawn a curtain behind his eyes. 


End file.
